One Macomb couple’s effort to save one cat

Jim Wells shows a photo of the feral kitten that he and his wife, Anita, helped. David Dalton -- The Macomb Daily

Seeing a couple of loose cats and finding feces in the bushes at her home made Anita Wells wonder if feral cats could become a nuisance her neighborhood.

Wells, who cares deeply about animals, began researching feral cats — lost or abandoned cats plus kittens born in the wild to cats that were once domesticated but have had little or no human interaction.

She and her husband, Jim, learned that a resident of her Macomb Township neighborhood was feeding the animals. While she understood the desire to feed the seemingly innocent creatures, they also realized it wasn’t helping to reduce the population of the free-roaming felines.

Then in early spring 2013, they noticed six very tiny kittens playing on her front lawn. Anita began giving them milk, hoping it would help them survive.

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Jim realized the quandary.

“They were hardly able to fend for themselves,” he said. “The things were hungry.”

A veterinarian told Anita he would examine the kittens but only one at a time, and only if they were transported in a trap and when no other animals were at the clinic, because feral cats often carry diseases and may act aggressively.

The group of kittens — feral cats typically live in colonies — shrank to four. Then three. Then two.

Another neighbor suspected the ones who disappeared were killed by coyotes spotted in a nearby undeveloped commercial parcel.

The last one became special to the couple.

During summer and autumn, the kitten nicknamed “Angel” appeared at their home almost daily. Anita got up almost every morning to place cat food, filtered water and organic milk in bowls. Sometimes she provided a bit of salmon.

They repeated the routine in the evening. As soon as they turned on the porch light, the kitten arrived.

“I wanted to keep her alive till I could find” a solution, said Anita, who added that the kitten seemed to get friendlier, sometimes brushing up against her leg.

During that time, Anita phoned friends to see if anyone would take the kitten if it checked out medically OK. She also phoned more than two dozen “no-kill” shelters.

“They all said, ‘We’re all full,’” she said.

She asked Fido and Fluffy’s Rescue, an Armada-based nonprofit organization that rescues homeless and abandoned dogs and cats from “high kill” shelters in Michigan and Ohio, for help. The group’s president, Rose Rogala, advised them to trap Angel and drove to the couple’s home a few times but never spotted it.

Jim suffered a stroke in June, so much of the couple’s attention turned to his numerous medical and rehabilitation appointments.

Still, they saw a few other adult cats prowling in their partially developed subdivision. As Anita stepped onto her patio one day, one cat jumped onto her head from the edge of the roof of the couple’s ranch-style home before scampering away.

When the couple didn’t see the Angel in early winter, Anita searched the neighborhood, without luck. But eventually, the kitten returned. During the first deep freeze in January as animal welfare experts warned owners to not leave pets outdoors in the harsh cold, Jim worried if Angel would survive. They couldn’t bring the cat inside because Anita is allergic to cats, and they were concerned it might carry disease or run terrified throughout their home without being caught or worse, that it might bite them.

‘I was just afraid to grab her,” Anita said.

Jim paid $140 for a new plastic kennel lined with Styrofoam and a pillow, with a small opening. He also thought about setting a heated mat inside. But the kitten wouldn’t enter.

Eventually, a cat trap set in January by the Wellses worked. They agreed to turn over the trapped kitten to a neighbor who planned to give it to a no-kill shelter or to a relative to help domesticate the kitten. Anita and Jim provided the leftover cat food and offered to pay for veterinary care.

“Our mistake was not finding her a home when she was little,” Jim said. But he noted that the group of kittens “wouldn’t let us get too close to them.”

Rogala, of Fido and Fluffy’s Rescue, said feral cats should never be brought indoors because the animal may have rabies or fleas that can be spread through a home. Her nonprofit group provides traps.

A feral cat that has reached about a year old could require several months — even a couple years — to domesticate.

“Not a lot of people are up for the work involved in rehabbing these animals,” she said. The alternative — which she and other experts recommend — is to trap the feral cats, have them spayed or neutered, and returned to the area they roamed.

County changes policy

In 2011, 4,766 cats were brought to the Macomb County Animal Shelter. Owners reclaimed 76, 420 were adopted and a whopping 3,942 were euthanized.

“All Macomb County Animal Control was, was the exterminator,” Chief Animal Control Officer Jeff Randazzo said.

In 2013, the county starkly changed its approach — sterilizing healthy cats, providing vaccinations and removing the tips of ears as a universal symbol to identify them as sterilized. Of the 1,526 cats brought to the shelter that year, nearly 130 feral ones were returned to the community from which they were brought in under trap-neuter-return. Among the other cats, owners claimed only two dozen but more than 600 were adopted into new homes.

The goal of trap-neuter-return is to allow healthy feral cats to live and to return them to their colonies to prevent the “vacuum effect” in which cats will reproduce more rapidly to fill a void in their colony be reproducing more often.

“We estimated there are about 140,000 feral cats living in Macomb County,” Randazzo said. “The cat population is exploding. Why not control the cat population through spay and neutering?”

According to the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance, more than 50,000 homeless cats and dogs are killed in Michigan shelters every year.

The not-for-profit organization said it takes days for animal control officers, shelter works and veterinarians to determine if a scared cat in a trap or cage is indeed feral — or just scared. To that end, the state of Michigan requires that all cats brought to a shelter must be held at least four days.

Using a PetSmart Charities grant, the Macomb County animal shelter will provide that service for those cities for free through December 2014.

In January, the Macomb County Animal Shelter took a starkly different approach to dealing with stray cats. The shelter, located in Mount Clemens, stopped accepting stray cats from the larger cities in Macomb County that didn’t participate in a trap-neuter-return program for feral cats.

The county hiked fees last August for some of its services. Last August, the county boosted the $65 fee for a 5-day hold of a stray animal, to $100. The fee for a 10-day quarantine jumped from $153 to $225.

Officials in Sterling Heights, Warren, St. Clair Shores, Roseville and Eastpointe began forming a coalition to seek alternative places for animal control services. Sterling Heights voted to contract with Animal Care Hospital, located in the city.

Sterling Heights officials insist their approach is to save animals, but the facility could euthanize the cats following a 5-day holding period if the cats are not adopted.

Animal Care Hospital will charge coalition cities that approve a contract $150 to quarantine an animal up to 65 pounds for $150 days, or $170 for larger animals.

St. Clair Shores officials later opted to maintain its contract with the Macomb County Animal Shelter.

Macomb County was a finalist for a $5,000 grant from Alley Cat Allies, which awards grants to shelters that drop the “catch and kill” approach to unadoptable cats in favor of spaying and neutering and returning feral cats to the wild. The county was not awarded one of the five grants but Randazzo’s efforts have impressed the organization, which continues to provide guidance and support.

“(Catch-and-kill) is an endless cycle, because the cats that remain simply continue breeding and the population rises back to capacity,” said Amanda Novotny, special projects manager at Alley Cat Allies. “Chief Randazzo realized a while ago that the old methods used to attempt to control the cat population were not working, nor were they humane.”

The Michigan Pet Fund Alliance has tried to convince Sterling Heights, Warren, Roseville and Eastpointe to return to the county animal shelter instead of Animal Care Hospital, for services.

“We are puzzled and perplexed with the animal contract you have undertaken,” the organization’s chairwoman, Deborah Schutt, said in an email to elected officials of those towns. “Trap and kill has been a failure at controlling feral populations.”